SAN BERNARDINO: Journalist crosses the Mojave on foot

But Charles F. Lummis, one of my brethren from another era, took things to a whole different level.

Lummis was the editor of a weekly newspaper in Chillicothe, Ohio, in 1884, when he got a job offer to come to California as the city editor of the Los Angeles Times.

Two years earlier, a transcontinental railroad line had been completed to California. Lummis could be there in a week, maybe less. But no. He had other ideas.

I know what you’re thinking: Stagecoach? Horseback? Covered wagon?

Nope.

Lummis, 26, decided to hoof it.

His own writing and some historical accounts indicate that he made this decision on his own. He told his friends — who, not surprisingly, thought he was crazy that he wanted to see the country first hand, from the ground.

I suspect that the news business then was probably the same in many ways and that the real reason he walked was that he couldn’t get any compensation for moving expenses.

He did, however, get paid for the columns that he sent both papers from the road during his 143 days of walking. He set off from Ohio in late September and arrived in Los Angeles Feb. 1.

Although he ran into obstacles along the way — he fell while climbing a cliff face in Arizona, broke his arm and had to set it himself — the greatest challenge he faced was crossing the Mojave Desert. In a book he later published, “A Tramp Across the Continent,” the chapter on this leg of the journey is called “The Worst of It.”

His determined refusal to give up his trek and take the train could not have been made any easier by the fact that he pretty much followed the newly laid Santa Fe line from Needles to Daggett, east of Barstow.

He rested at telegraph stations — desolate outposts with one or two men manning the line. He slept in chairs next to stoves when he could. But on occasion, he slept on the ground and “covered myself with sand.”

He found little or no help when it came to food and provisions.

The station operators “had little to eat for themselves and could seldom spare me anything,” he wrote in his book. “My board was the daily quart of water and a cake of chocolate — which contains more nutriment in the same bulk than anything else available, and which was all I could carry.”

How’s that for preparation? One bottle of water and a cake of chocolate. Enjoy the next 40 miles of desert.

It’s not surprising that when he stumbled across a human skull west of Amboy one night — he’d given up trying to travel during the heat of the day, even in January — he concocted a fantasy about the poor pioneer’s fate, lost in the desert looking for water with “blinded eyes and shriveled brain” before he perished.

The following day, he was tempted by a mirage in the valley below the hills he was crossing.

“It was as hard an effort of the will as I ever made not to rush down the long, gentle slope and throw myself into that azure paradise and soak and drink,” he wrote, “but I knew there was no water there.”

When he finally got close to Los Angeles, Times’ publisher Harrison Gray Otis met up with him and they walked the final nine miles together. It’s logical to imagine that Otis would have given the weary trekker a few days of rest.